For a while now, I’ve been a big fan of a pattern in C# which mimics Java enums to a certain extent. In general, it’s a lovely pattern. Only after reading a comment on a recent blog post by Eric Lippert did I find out about a horrible flaw. Dubious thanks to John Payson for … Continue reading Violating the “smart enum” pattern in C# →

Previously we enumerated all the combinations of a particular size from a sequence by observing that the sequence {50, 60, 70, 80, 90} had combinations of exactly three elements as follows: { // 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 {50, 60, … Continue reading →

This post has a few purposes – it’s partly a bit of advertising, but it’s also meant to serve as a quick way of replying to speaking requests for a while… if you’ve been directed here by an email from me, I hope you’ll excuse the “form letter” approach. (You can probably skip down to … Continue reading Writing and speaking update →

When is a string not a string? As part of my “work” on the ECMA-334 TC49-TG2 technical group, standardizing C# 5 (which will probably be completed long after C# 6 is out… but it’s a start!) I’ve had the pleasure of being exposed to some of the interesting ways in which Vladimir Reshetnikov has tortured … Continue reading When is a string not a string? →

My next article about graph traversal is pre-empted by this breaking news; I’ll pick up that series again soon. Yesterday morning a coworker forwarded to me an article about a recently patched security hole in Windows, and wondered if I had … Continue reading →

Here’s a few things you may not be aware of: C# identifiers can include Unicode escape sequences (\u1234 etc) C# identifiers can include Unicode characters in the category “Other, formatting” (Cf) but these are ignored when comparing identifiers for equality The Mongolian Vowel Separator (U+180E) has oscillated between the Cf and Zs categories a couple … Continue reading When is an identifier not an identifier? (Attack of the Mongolian Vowel Separator) →

Now that the Visual Studio 2015 Preview is available and the C# 6 feature set is a bit more stable, I figured it was time to start updating the Noda Time 2.0 source code to C# 6. The target framework is still .NET 3.5 (although that might change; I gather very few developers are actually … Continue reading C# 6 in action →

Last week I learned that using static is going to be the syntax for importing static members (including extension methods) in C# 6. That fulfils a feature request I made in September 2005 (my fourth ever blog post, as it happens). With a feature request turnaround of 10 years, I figure I should get put … Continue reading C# 7 feature request #1… extension attributes →

The problem Invoking event handlers in C# has always been a bit of a pain, because an event with no subscribers is usually represented as a null reference. This leads to code like this: It’s important to use the handler local variable, as if instead you access the field twice, it’s possible that the last … Continue reading Clean event handler invocation with C# 6 →

New York City-based writer, comedian, and video editor Bryan Menegus (previously) has created a four-minute compilation video for Digg that summarizes all six 2015 Oscar-nominated films for Best Picture. The films include Whiplash, Birdman, Boyhood, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Selma, and The Theory of Everything. The Best Picture category has gotten more bloated over the […]

In their latest video, Tripp Crosby and Tyler Stanton of Tripp and Tyler (previously) promote Present Spray, a handy pneumatic device that helps you ensure that all friends and family within a 500 foot radius are paying attention to you.

In the charming and thought-provoking short film “Draw My Life,” filmmaker Casey Neistat (previously) employs drawings to tell the story of his remarkably eventful life, from his tumultuous early years to his success as a New York City-based YouTube auteur. The drawings are by artist Kim Smith, and the film’s music is by Jordan Galland. […]

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"The UberCloud Community brings together over 3,000 participants to pave the way for the Technical Computing Cloud. UberCloud Experiment teams explore the end-to-end process of accessing remote computing resources in HPC centers and in the Cloud to study and overcome the potential roadblocks for industry applications such as CAE, Bio and Life Sciences."

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Here’s the rest of the story regarding successors, spins or forks of CrunchBang. The tech media is falling over itself reporting that the “successor” to CrunchBang is something called #!++ which, to many CrunchBang insiders, is nothing more than one — but not “the resurrection” — project based on CrunchBang. It’s a project that appears, in the opinion of many CrunchBang contributors, as one that is trying to capitalize on the name, now that it’s “available,” in a manner of speaking.

Introduction to salt stack through initial installation onward to installing, configuring, and managing tomcat with a state file.

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"I think it’s a very interesting period for human cosmology because it’s a golden age in which every ten years we learn breathtaking new parts of the story. We have never before been able to do that in human history – to have the chance we have now to look at and understand the universe we live in."

In this video, Fujitsu CTO Pierre Lagier describes how the company enables customers to access high performance computing capabilities on desktop PCs with the Fujitsu HPC Gateway and the Intel Cluster Ready program.

I’ve been getting a bit cross about backward compatibility recently. This post contains two examples of backward incompatibilities in .NET 4.6, and one example of broken code which isn’t being fixed due for backward compatibility reasons. Let me start off by saying this post is not meant to be seen as an attack on Microsoft. … Continue reading Backward compatibility pain →

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Every time a new release of Fedora becomes available, Fedora user communities around the world gather to share the new release with each other, upgrade their systems, and eat celebratory cake.

In this video from SC14, Arni Mittal and Ethan Oayne from the John Monash Science School in Melbourne embark on a journey to New Orleans to uncover the world of supercomputing.

In this video, Intel's James Reinders and Vadim Karpusenko from Colfax International discuss the future of parallel programming and Intel MIC architecture products.

In this South by Southwest podcast, Maytal Dahan from the Texas Advanced Computing Center describes an upcoming meet up session entitled: Science and Tech Meet Up: Scientists and Geeks Unite!

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"Imagine an entire IT infrastructure controlled not by hands and hardware, but by software. One in which application workloads such as big data, analytics, simulation and design are serviced automatically by the most appropriate resource, whether running locally or in the cloud. A Software Defined Infrastructure enables your organization to deliver IT services in the most efficient way possible, optimizing resource utilization to accelerate time to results and reduce costs."

In this Chip Chat podcast, John Nguyen from Supermicro discusses the new "System on a Chip" Intel Xeon Processor D-1500 and how Supermicro is integrating this new solution into their products.

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In this slidecast, Bill Lee and Rupert Dance from the InfiniBand Trade Association describe the new IBTA Volume 1 Specification Release. "The new release defines new capabilities that will enable computer systems to keep up with the requirements for increased scalability and bandwidth, along with high computing efficiency and high availability for both high performance computing and commercial enterprise data centers."

The Fedora 22 Alpha release has arrived, with a preview of the latest free and open source technology under development. Take a peek inside! Get Fedora 22 Alpha Workstation Get […]

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The thing is, here in the FOSS world we have absolutely no way of knowing how many people might be using a particular distro. There are no licenses to sign, and companies using Linux aren’t required to take inventory to make sure they’re staying in compliance. So while Microsoft and Apple can give us a pretty accurate figure for the number of times their operating systems have been legally installed in the last few months or so, we can’t. Unlike Windows, Linux doesn’t require users to sign draconian EULAs. Unlike Apple, our distros aren’t performing all of the installs themselves on machines they manufacture.

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Simulation of physical processes such as the waves in an ocean or the wake behind a boat, although similar in a number of ways, require different approaches. With current systems designed with many parallel computational units, it is important to take advantage of the range of architectural features. Using HYDRO2D, the performance of the code can be examined and improved by taking advantage of a range of system features.

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In this Purematter video, SGI CEO Jorge Titinger discusses the role that his experiences as a professional soccer player has had in both his professional development and his company’s success. He also provides insights into how SGI is leveraging High Performance Computing to scale innovation faster than ever before.

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The human body is host to 100 trillion microorganisms, ten times the number of cells in the human body, and these microbes contain 100 times the number of DNA genes that our human DNA does. UC San Diego CSE Professor, Larry Smarr, discusses how data from these trillions of DNA bases are fed into supercomputers, resulting in innovative scalable visualization systems that allow for the examination of patterns that can be used to suggest new hypotheses for clinical application.